


loss functions (the butterfly effect)

by the_garbage_will_do



Category: Black Mirror (TV), Ex Machina (2015), Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Dystopia, Heavy Angst, Kylux Adjacent Month 2020, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Philosophy, Requited Unrequited Love, Suicide, Surveillance, but you don't have to know ex machina or black mirror, inspired by domhnall gleeson's black mirror episode
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-02
Updated: 2020-05-02
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:13:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,531
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23943718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_garbage_will_do/pseuds/the_garbage_will_do
Summary: When Ben Solo takes his own life, he leaves behind Caleb— roommate, partner in philosophy, would-have-been-lover. Then Sith AI offers to resurrect Ben as an advanced artificial intelligence.Caleb has questions.
Relationships: Armitage Hux/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren, Caleb Smith/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 14
Kudos: 19
Collections: Into the Adjacentverse: Kylux Adjacents Month 2020





	loss functions (the butterfly effect)

**Author's Note:**

> This is a crossover of _Ex Machina_ and _Star Wars_ , inspired by Domhnall Gleeson's episode of Black Mirror. Like all the canon sources it's based on, this story is heavy on the Major Character Death.
> 
> If you're not familiar with _Ex Machina_ , the main things you should know are that robots are extremely advanced, Blue Book is a sketchy tech giant, and Blue Book's CEO Nathan is played by Oscar Isaac, also known for playing Poe Dameron.

Caleb’s been here before.

(Technically not true. Cemeteries are old news, but he’s never attended a funeral before this one. He missed his parents’, being laid up in the hospital at the time, and wonders occasionally, _what if.)_

Caleb’s late to the viewing. This time there’s no hospital stay to blame, just his own haphazard rambling around random Brooklyn flower shops. He spent the morning searching them up on Blue Book and sprinting from store to store, searching until he found just the one flower. 

(Not that _he’d_ care. It’s not like he ever expressed much of a taste in flowers to Caleb. And according to his own loudly expressed views on the afterlife, it’s not like he’s around to notice.)

He’s lying in an open casket, with one of those cozy sweaters that always made him seem more like a world-weary professor than a twenty-something undergrad. It’s a pure black garment with long arms, neatly covering over the wrists with Grade-A cashmere. A second late, Caleb notices the tactical strategy behind the aesthetic one.

Caleb remembers stealing glances at him when he slept, the rare tranquil moments unburdened by the weight of his own thoughts. He looks like he’s sleeping now. His clean-shaven cheek is soft like Caleb always thought it might be, if cold to his touch.

Caleb’s been here before.

.

Caleb steps forward with a single flower— an electric-blue butterfly pea— and places it at Benoni Solo’s grave.

.

He loiters around the cemetery a little while longer, unsure of quite what to do with himself. Ben’s parents linger together by the grave, and Caleb shakes off the joke he hears at once in Ben’s voice— _and that, ladies and gentlemen, is the closest we’ve gotten in seventeen years_. He makes conversation with a few other stragglers. There’s no one else from college as far as he can tell. The ones closest to his age all turn out to be coworkers of Ben’s, engineers from First Order, a couple compliance people too. They’re all in black, wearing expressions of appropriate sympathy, but Caleb doesn’t spot a hint of surprise among them.

“Do you think it was starkiller?” he hears as he passes two of them by.

“Why did he do it?” Ben’s mother exclaims, drowning them out, drowning halfway between grief and rage. “What if we had just _called?”_

.

Caleb has limited rights to grief this time. He and Ben kept up their texts for a solid ten days after graduation, before new employee orientations and moving vans cut that thread, and even when Caleb moved back from California to New York he never quite got around to re-establishing contact. He couldn’t formulate that email, and once the bustle of a new job at Blue Book sucked him in, he forgot to keep trying.

Before today’s viewing, he had barely remembered what Ben even looked like. His face was always hard to pin down, impossible to compress into one clear image. It was a set of jigsaw features that never fell into place, and after all the years Caleb only recalled vague shadows. 

(Lips so plush they bordered on awkward, equally quick to scowl or smile. A stare so intense it bordered on awkward before circling around to intimate, so at the height of his focus it seemed there was no world beyond him and you. Brown eyes, sweet and so quick to rain.)

Caleb glances over at Ben’s father, who kneels rigid-backed, hand brushing the dirt once, then again, as if his son might still notice.

Caleb has no right to grief, this time.

He abandons the subway at Union Square and walks the rest of the way back to work, traversing Manhattan’s grid structure half on autopilot. He fiddles with his phone while he walks. After a quick password reset, he logs back into his long-abandoned account on Blue Bird, Blue Book’s speciality social media site for bloggers with particularly concise styles or short attention spans, with every post limited to 255 characters. In college Caleb had only signed up because everyone else had, but Ben had thrived on Blue Bird, had monologued on the thrills of finding meaning in ephemera.

Caleb clicks on @bensolo, uncertain what to expect. A note, maybe. A final manifesto, a well-organized catalogue of wounds inflicted.

He gets a jigsaw puzzle, scrambled. Latin quotes left uncited and untranslated. Comments on the fountain pens Ben had purchased as late as last month, and the different syringes he used to fill them. Links to new machine learning papers and op-eds, offered up with single-sentence responses— questions, comments, the occasional thoughtful critique. Snapshots of yoga poses he meant to try. Snapshots of his own calligraphy, as painstakingly ornate as it was in college, lavishing curls on random words he had picked up on BluePedia. The last post is a picture of the word “kilobyte,” written largely in his usual black. “Kilo,” though, is rendered in a new ink he was trying out, expensive and experimental and brilliant blue.

There’s no note. No cries for help. No foreshadowing, besides the gradual slowing of his posts. No alarm bell beyond the growing silence.

.

This, Caleb remembers. 

Ben Solo on Caleb’s bed. He nearly always was in sophomore year, because the chairs were broken, and Ben had the top bunk and it was too hard to hold a civilized discussion with one partner in such a literally superior position, entirely out of sight.

“Ancient philosophy’s going to be the death of me,” Ben remarked one night, after dropping a textbook onto the floor with a stern _clunk._

And Caleb had promptly logged off his server for the night and set aside his laptop, ready to listen.

“So get this,” Ben began. “At Socrates’s trial, his defense was apparently that he was ‘the master of love.’”

Caleb gaped for a second. “Works great as a song title…”

“Less so as a legal defense.”

“No wonder they gave him the hemlock.”

Ben let out a snort. “So naturally, I checked the Greek. Turns out he used ‘eros’ for love, which is particularly...sexual, as word choices go. But it’s also a pun on ‘eroto.’” His voice wobbled on that last syllable, preserving what Caleb assumed was the true accent. “And ‘eroto’’s the Greek verb for ‘question.’”

“That’s good, right? Makes a bit more sense for a philosopher to say he asks good questions,” Caleb said, with a lift of the eyebrows.

“I don’t know,” he answered, and there was a punchline coming, the smile already audible in his voice. “Is it good that I went on BlueStor and found a lengthy article on how Socrates’s philosophical dialogues work as foreplay?” 

Caleb’s eyebrows shot even further up. _“No.”_

_“Yes.”_

“How does that even _happen?”_

“Glad you asked.” Ben pulled his legs up onto Caleb’s mattress, settling in for a couple hours’ dialogue of their own. “Allegedly in the Greek conception of men’s love…”

.

“I’m fine,” Caleb assures his deskmates with perfect sincerity upon returning to Blue Book’s offices. “He was my college roommate, that’s all.”

.

That night, once the lights are off and he’s tucked into bed, Caleb winds up back on Blue Bird. He traverses the graph, following one link from Ben’s feed and then another. More often than not, the hyperlinks lead back to First Order.

“Quick question- what the hell’s up with JEDI?”

Caleb had skimmed over this post of Ben’s before, the start of a lengthy plain-text thread. The second time around it pops, more substantial and colorful than the wispy posts around it. A quick Blue Book search refreshes Caleb’s memory on the whole JEDI scandal— the military had awarded a massive contract for computing services to Blue Book, even while Republic Tech had seemed a far better match.

“(1/9) Forget the technicalities. The essence of the issue is a rigged system, where bureaucracy and petty intrigue won over merit. It didn’t matter what Republic offered; true capability meant nothing against Blue Book’s empire…”

Caleb had ignored the controversy at the time; his department at Blue Book had nothing to do with the defense contract, and so the drama had unfolded at the very edge of his periphery. Ben Solo had no personal connection to the story either. Though he worked at First Order and First Order worked on high-end weapons tech, it was a relatively minor upstart— not linked to Blue Book, Republic or any of the tech giants in competition.

Still, Ben’s posts thrum with passion. He opened with “forget the technicalities” and then promptly dove into the technicalities, explaining in intricate detail how Republic’s technical capacities matched or outpaced Blue Book’s, and Caleb can _hear_ it all, the flood of insights, like drinking from a fire hose and it’ll never be enough. He can still see Ben Solo’s outline at the foot of his bed, hands gesturing like the words are too much to contain, their shadows fluttering like wings on the wall, and he can hear the words stop-starting in that voice he still remembers down to its every curve and contour—

“(9/9) In conclusion, it’s not fair.”

Caleb can’t remember when he started sobbing.

.

He goes to work every morning, knocked off-balance by his own lack of sleep. Every night, he opens Blue Bird, checking for new posts from @bensolo.

.

“Sorry,” Caleb says, once he’s out of danger of dropping his phone, “but no thanks.”

Gripping the phone too hard, he switches to his mobile browser and types a search into Blue Book: “sith ai.”

“Yeah, no,” he repeats, trying not to snap at a sales rep who probably hates this conversation as much as he does. He glances through the glass wall of his private meeting room, out at the hubbub of Blue Book’s offices. “I’m not interested. How did you even get my name?”

When he pulls up the company’s sleek black-and-red website, he gets his answer: “We are Sith, a Blue Book subsidiary.”

“Why do you know I look at Ben’s Blue Bird, isn’t there some sort of privacy agreement…” He trails off with a sigh. Blue Book’s terms of service are famously dense; even Ben would’ve struggled to make sense of them. Caleb never tries.

“We at Sith know we couldn’t possibly replace him,” says the rep— Rey, a woman with a patient, unfailingly optimistic tone. “We would just be happy to supply more Blue Bird posts in his writing style, free of cost. We won’t even modify his real underlying account; they would only be inserted to appear for @calebsmith.”

Caleb scoffs. “Do people really find that helpful?”

“Our services have been evaluated by tens of thousands of mourners and consistently ranked as useful, when coping with the deaths of loved ones.”

“Why me?” He has no claim to grief this time, none whatsoever compared to Ben’s mother and father and the co-workers who talked to him every day and the countless friends he surely made after college.

“I’m afraid I cannot comment on Sith’s selection algorithm,” she replies, sounding thoroughly apologetic.

“I’m sorry,” Caleb says. “Sorry, but no. Post-mortem computer-generated Blue Bird posts are just. Not what I want from Ben. Sorry, I have to… there’s a work thing.”

He hangs up, breathing far too hard.

.

“We are Sith. Our work blends bleeding-edge artificial intelligence with human psychology. We chose our name in honor of the spectral cats of Scottish legend, but where those Sith greedily stole the souls of the dead, we replicate the behavior of those who have passed on in a respectful and ethical manner, to ease the pain of loved ones left behind. Past services include generating family photos with children born posthumously, recording messages of love from the deceased…”

Caleb stares, uncomprehending. Switches back to Ben’s Blue Bird timeline, cut off two weeks before his death. Switches back to Sith.

An incoming call breaks into his reverie.

“Hello?”

“Hi! It’s Rey from Sith again. Is this a bad time?”

“No, I…” His face twitches into a smile he doesn’t really mean. “I guess not?”

“I just wanted to say that we hear you completely. Extra Blue Bird posts aren’t what you want at this time in your grief.”

“Yes, and—”

“And so,” she slips in smoothly, “we wanted to offer you the chance to take part in an advanced experimental trial.”

Caleb blinks. “What trial?”

She explains it. In her crisp, clear British accent she walks him through the entire set-up. An overview of the technology. The evaluation metrics—

“No,” he says, more sharply this time. “Rey, you’re trying to replace Ben. You can’t. Even if you can, you shouldn’t.”

“Your concerns are entirely understandable, and if that’s your final decision we’ll of course respect it,” she chirps. “But in the interest of making sure you’re informed about the choice, you should know the primary goal of the study.”

His eyes flutter closed, and he drops his head. “...what’s the primary goal?””

“We’re looking to help children who lose loved ones. The sudden trauma of a loss can have such massive repercussions for a child’s wellbeing. We hope we can slow the impact. Spread out the pain, like the crumple zone on a car, so they have the chance to process grief at their own pace.”

The words hit him like a car crash, because he’s been here before. Caleb remembers the endless white of the children’s hospital, the sense that he might’ve attained that elusive “closure” if he’d been mobile enough to attend his own parents’ funeral. The irony of healing physically at the cost of a bleeding hole left untended in his head. Over and over in that airless white cave he’d asked himself, _what if._

When Rey calls the next time, he says yes.

.

“So by your standard,” Caleb had asked, keenly aware of Ben’s giant feet warm against his under his threadbare dorm room blanket, “what defines a person’s consciousness?”

“I don’t know,” he laughed. “We don’t get there until after midterms. What do you think?”

Caleb didn’t answer at first, and the room was silent except for their breathing. 

“Happiness,” he offered. “Happiness and pain.”

“Simple and balanced,” commented Ben.

“Yeah.”

“So by that standard, the ability to go ‘ow’ is central to the human experience.”

And then they were chuckling, laughing in that hazy post-midnight darkness.

.

Caleb schedules delivery for after work on Friday, well past sunset. 

It’s appropriate, he supposes. In college he and Ben had turned off the light every evening at sunset, to keep Ben’s insomnia in check. It was hardly an inconvenience; Caleb’s assignments were all on his laptop anyhow, and he’d sit on his pillows and type away late into the night, his screen dimmed and carefully angled towards himself. On the foot of Caleb’s mattress, Ben would keep working, clipping a little red spectrum book light onto his current volume. After quitting for the night he’d clamber up onto his bunk bed in the dark, feeling his way by memory, unless they fell into conversation and he fell asleep right where he was— in Caleb’s bed during sophomore year, legs tangled together. He remembers Ben Solo in shadows.

It’s appropriate, really.

At first all he sees is the outline. A Ben-shaped shadow sitting on the front stairs of Caleb’s apartment building, head tucked down, knees curled up close. Like a giant trying to be invisible.

Caleb stops still and blinks too fast, suddenly blinded.

Once he recovers, he strides forth with a smile, half-forced, half-free and painful with hope, and comes to a stop before the stairs.

The shadow shifts, black clothes rustling. “Caleb Smith.”

Caleb remembers _that voice,_ the color of warm rust, suddenly flooding all his veins. “Ben Solo.”

The shadow tips its head up to see Caleb, and the streetlight’s glow illuminates sweet brown eyes. It ripples over plush lips, quirked with irony.

After a long moment, the shadow speaks. “Something like that.”

.

Blue Book works on the cutting edge of AI and robotics. Sith is a Blue Book subsidiary. Therefore, Sith can design advanced automatons.

It’s a clear logical path, A to B to C, and yet Caleb can’t comprehend the robot sitting in front of him.

It looks like Ben Solo’s sitting in front of him.

Caleb’s not certain what the social protocol is when entertaining an AI. First, he fumbles with his phone and replies affirmatively to a Sith text asking whether delivery was successful. Then he asks the robot inside, and with the faintest whir of gears it rises from the stairs and steps aside, allowing Caleb to unlock the door. He leads it to his apartment, makes himself a cup of tea, just barely stops himself from asking whether the _robot_ wants a cup of tea, and perches on a stool opposite not-Ben. Thus far, not-Ben’s kept quiet and moved in a perfectly polite, socially appropriate manner, except for the bemused look he occasionally shoots Caleb’s way.

“What’s your name?” Caleb asks. That’s what he should do, isn’t it? The classic icebreaker, the logical first step in this bizarre non-Turing-Test.

“Should I say ‘Ben Solo’?”

It watches Caleb intently. Caleb gapes right back.

“I expected an answer,” he finally admits, “not a question.”

Not-Ben shrugs. “I think I gave you both.”

“Oh?”

“To address your literal question, I’ve been called plenty of things. I have a serial number in the Sith system: KR and then a confidential sequence of digits. Then Sith has a variable for my public name, and it says ‘Benoni Solo.” It snorts, and Caleb can at once hear the joke Ben would have made, _it takes a certain kind of mother to skip “Benjamin” and name her kid “son of my sorrow.”_ “The name you were most likely expecting was ‘Ben Solo.’ But I’m not him.”

“You’re not?”

It shifts again, folding its arms on the counter and playing with the cuffs of its dark blue sweater. “To address a more interesting question, I have multiple competing objectives. The primary one is to help you.” It holds Caleb’s gaze until he nods. “A secondary one is to be like Ben Solo, but that’s remarkably vague as mandates go. I could pretend I’m Ben resurrected, impersonate him to the best of my ability. Or I could act like Ben might, if he woke up one day and found he had died and been...translated into robotic form.”

Caleb stalls by sipping his tea. “Is there a difference between those two things?”

“Definitely. I chose the second route. If I picked plain impersonation, I would’ve just told you plainly my name was Ben Solo.”

Caleb tries to imagine what people say when they first meet. All he can think of is a first date: _where are you from, what’s your job, how do you spend your free time._ All shallow questions, and safe.

Then again, Ben always had a way of short-circuiting conversations. Of diving straight to the deepest question.

So Caleb plays along. “Why make that choice?”

“Ben would’ve.”

Caleb can’t argue.

“Plus,” it continues, “this helps objective one. You.”

“How does it help me?”

Not-Ben purses those lips for a second. “Imagine the cognitive dissonance if we didn’t admit I’m not literally your Ben.” Caleb winces at the thought, and it nods. “It’s easier for us both if we skip that pretense.”

“You’re not Ben,” Caleb agrees. “So who are you?”

Its face splits into a massive grin like Ben at his best, at his _most,_ when watching him was dangerous as staring into the sun. “That’s the most impossible question out there.”

.

By the time he retires for the night, Caleb is wide awake. 

Outside his bedroom door, not-Ben rests. Caleb watched it curl up on the sofa— in the fetal position because the couch isn’t long enough— and close its eyes and slow the rhythm of its feigned breathing. It could have been sleeping, if not for the custom ethernet cable strung from wall to wrist, slithering under the cuff of his sweater. “Daily synchronization and fine-tuning,” it had explained when Caleb asked why.

So now Caleb lies in bed, kicking his blanket off, then hauling it back on again. He’s identified at least fifty technical questions to ask by now— _how well can it hear_ , _how does it see, where is its data stored — _ but suspicion niggles at him, the feeling that those aren’t the questions that matter at all. He’s landed himself in a perfect philosophical hypothetical, _what if you were resurrected as a robot_. It’s the sort of absurd scenario, the sort of question Ben lived for.

He stays awake until late. When his mind finally calms, it’s his soundest sleep since college graduation.

.

He dreams he’s chasing butterflies with electric-blue wings, forever fluttering out of reach. The sunlight wakes him in slivers, drifting soft over his eyes, and he quickly realizes what he was dreaming of.

Senior year. A rare interaction outside their dorm room, a rare moment together in daylight. Caleb had hit rock bottom— there was a girl in his logic study group, and he thought there was a spark there, until they both made it past the psets and she suddenly ghosted him— and Ben had listened to Adele’s _21_ about twenty-one times through, sound filtering past Caleb’s ratty earbuds. Finally, he pulled the laptop out of Caleb’s hands.

“Quit moping, you’re going to steal my world title.”

“I’m fine,” Caleb protested.

“You’re pining over Eliza.”

“Eliza?” Caleb had frowned at him.

“That’s her name, right? Short brown hair, dark eyes?”

“Yeah, but Eliza was from that back-to-school party,” Caleb said, looking down as he was hit with a fresh awareness of his own patheticness. “This is Yasmin. Short _black_ hair.” 

“Ah.”

“And dark eyes that sparkle, and the nicest smile, and these little beauty marks and…” He cut himself off and looked back up at Ben, expecting him to laugh at his wallowing. But Ben was watching him seriously, with a tiny, sad furrow to his brow.

“Come on,” he’d said. “There’s a butterfly exhibit at the Museum of Natural History, go with me.”

“Butterflies?”

“They’re my favorite animal, bar none,” he replied, perfectly solemn. “The blue ones are the best.”

And Caleb had let himself be dragged out into the sunlight, half-convinced that Ben was joking, that they’d really end up at an oddly specific boutique for fountain pens instead. He half-expected to wake up and find this all a transient dream even as Ben led him down the streets, taking his wrist on occasion, even as Ben bought a bag of Caleb’s favorite hot chestnuts and unsubtly let him have three-quarters of the lot. Even as he followed Ben into the exhibit and watched him turn his face up and beam at the world, his frame the one constant amidst a kaleidoscope of butterflies.

.

“If you’re okay with it,” Caleb declares, “I’m going to call you ‘Ben.’”

The robot remains on the couch— sitting up now, but still plugged into the wall. Caleb looks at it. Him. Then he proceeds to breakfast.

“I’m glad we established that you don’t think you’re Ben, and I don’t think you’re Ben,” he continues, as if he makes such statements every day while pouring his cereal. “But to keep things simple, I’d like to just call you ‘Ben.’”

This Ben bites his lip, and Caleb marvels for a moment at how realistically the silicone dips.

“I’m okay with it if you are,” Ben replies.

“So I have some basic questions for you. An experiment.”

“I expected nothing less.”

Caleb walks over to the couch with his cereal, and he debates for a moment whether he should put his feet up, like on his dorm room bunk bed, before leaving both feet on the floor. “Favorite song?”

“Depends on my mood. Right now, Bach’s Chaconne.”

Caleb had never gotten into old music the way Ben had, but a Bach piece seems entirely plausible. “Favorite movie?”

 _“The Dark Crystal.”_ He says it with a challenging glint in his eyes that Caleb recognizes, from the dorm common room in freshman year when Ben had gotten into an hour-long war about how _Dark Crystal_ had more artistic merit than every Marvel film combined.

“Favorite animal?”

“Cats. Black cats, specifically.”

Caleb continues on without comment. Black cats— it’s not a bad guess. Ben had kept a black cat on his lockscreen, and he had shown an unusual sympathy for their plight, burdened as they were with unjustified stigma. 

(But Caleb remembers that day at the museum, a sliver of Ben that Sith hasn’t claimed.)

(So the blue butterflies are Ben’s alone.)

“Favorite philosopher?”

Ben snorts, and Caleb lets that go unanswered. No one would need AI to guess that, not when all versions of his Ben’s resume had five mentions of Plato, minimum.

(His Ben. There’s a Ben sitting in front of him now, a carefully calibrated product of Sith, a Blue Book subsidiary. Once upon a time, there lived _his_ Ben. Caleb means to keep them in separate mental containers, like parallel threads never to tangle.)

“What if Ben were here? What would he ask, right now?”

This Ben stares for a moment, jaw pulsing. 

“How do you mean that?” he finally asks. “If he were here in the room with us, or if our roles were reversed and you were the one who’d…”

He trails off, and Caleb gives a little start. “Let’s try that first one. If he were in the room with us.”

“After the initial swearing—” Ben dons a wry smile at that— “he’d start probing the philosophical implications. Turns out some of humanity’s great existential questions look simpler, from my vantage point.”

“Like what?”

“Was I intelligently designed? Yeah,” he says with a shrug, the words gradually gaining speed. “By employees at Sith, hired specifically for being intelligent and being designers. Do I have free will? No way; there’s some pseudorandomness in how I learn and generate actions, but literally everything about me— every eventuality, every reaction I could ever have to any theoretical scenario— could be predicted if you had all the right numbers and sufficient computational power. More power than is currently available in practice, but the point stands. What’s my true purpose, the driving force of my existence? Easy. I have literal mathematical, objective functions. A loss to minimize, in more senses than one—”

“I see what you mean.” Caleb mentally kicks himself for interrupting, even as telltale tears prickle at his eyes.

“Sorry.” Ben’s whole mood shifts, suddenly subdued. “Sorry, what did I do wrong—”

“Nothing.”

Nothing wrong. Perhaps a bit too much right. It’s only Caleb had known a particular music in his Ben’s voice, a particular rhythm that rose only when Ben was really onto something in a 2am frenzy, crescendoing to a grand climax as he crashed through all his supporting evidence to at last strike the thesis. That Ben lies buried, and that same old music streamed just now at 10:45am from this Ben’s mechanical voice filters.

“Are you sure?” Ben mumbles, all his confidence crumbled to bits.

“Yes,” Caleb says too fast. This too, he remembers, though he thought perhaps an android might have polished away the mood swings. “What about, um, the other way?”

A frown flickers. “What?”

Caleb blinks the tears away, his voice too energetic. “I don’t remember exactly, but there was another what-if you mentioned.”

“Ah.” He starts speaking again, though still a little unsteady. “What if he were in your place, talking to an android based on you? What would he ask?”

“...Right.”

“Assuming the circumstances of your death at all mirrored his,” he murmurs, “he’d ask why, and what the hell he should’ve done to stop it.”

Caleb never thought he’d see an android on the brink of tears.

.

Caleb learns.

He discovers that this Ben can’t cry. His programming has minute control over the patented fiberglass of his eyes and the underlying projections, adjusting the dilation of the pupils and the direction of the gaze. It perfectly mimics that liminal moment pre-tears, down to the redness of blood vessels overflowing their bounds and the wobbling sheen of drops yet to fall. But they never fall, and Caleb asks why.

“We don’t have tear duct reservoirs,” he answers. “Too much rusting.”

True to life, he often dwells on the brink of tears.

This Ben’s programming relies on a particularly intricate arrangement of neural nets. Caleb learns fast as he can, researching neural nets via lengthy searches on Blue Book, and Ben confirms one of the primary technologies: the generative adversarial network. Every moment, Ben generates behaviors— words, gestures and expressions. Next he’s rapidly critiqued by judges, informed how human he seemed just now, how productive, how Ben-like, and pushed to improve. It’s a game of tug-of-war: Ben against a full army of judges speaking directly into his head, forever remaking himself to meet their ever-rising, unreachable standards.

“I’m your judge,” Caleb says. “Aren’t I?”

“One of the judges. There’s plenty of others, automated classifiers from Sith.”

“Does that make us adversaries?”

Ben watches him for a long moment. “I don’t think of you that way.”

There’s an odd emphasis on “you.”

The fact is Caleb judges Ben. He has to; those are the terms of the experiment. Sith texts every 12 hours, reminding him of phrases this Ben said or motions he made. Then it asks Caleb to rate those phrases and motions, to collapse all the complexity into a handful of numbers.

.

Caleb doesn’t think of the numbers more than he can help it. He pours himself into learning, newly returned to those wide-eyed college nights when he lived solely for new ideas, for exploring a vast world of knowledge with Ben at his side. When Caleb comes home, he and Ben crash on the couch and pass night after night in discussion, probing the robotic conception of self-awareness. 

Ben knows the general architecture of his nets. Still the specific settings, the weights and the biases that shape all his thought processes, remain private— all recorded in ones and zeros on Sith’s computers but shielded from _him._ There’s limits to his self-control, to how much he can willfully change his own settings. His body has mostly automatic systems for blinking or flinching or breathing. Same goes for kneejerk emotional responses, and Ben observes that he’s markedly less capable of emotional regulation than the average Sith robot.

“What do you mean?”

Ben explains: “I tell the emotional nets I don’t want a particular reaction, and they practically never pay attention. My conscious opinion on how I should feel or how I want to feel has very little weight, when it comes to deciding how I _do_ feel.”

Caleb would ask why Sith would make a robot that way, but there’s no need. Not when he remembers Ben.

It’s a matter of accuracy.

Accuracy is Sith’s primary objective, if its questionnaires are anything to go by. “Please rate,” they ask, “from a scale of 1 to 5 how likely the living Benoni Solo would have been to remark, ‘I tell the emotional nets I don’t want a particular reaction, and they practically never pay attention’...” 

And Caleb stares at his screen, torn in two directions. Because Ben Solo had a brain, not a stack of “emotional nets,” and so he’d never say that sentence unless reading aloud from some sci-fi avant-garde play. Because if Ben Solo were a robot, he’d think incessantly about the workings of his own thoughts, fascinated by the possibility of such precise metacognition, and Caleb stares at the question and wonders how to read a command so open to interpretation. He clicks “1,” and then “5,” and then “1” again. Barred from asking a robot to help judge itself, Caleb can only wish Ben was here, to sit with him in the ambiguity.

(Then there are moments he can’t judge: odd taut silences, when painted synthskin brushes too long against a human hand. When Ben’s gaze lingers on Caleb, and Caleb doesn’t know whether Ben’s changed or _he_ has, but he can’t look away.

When Caleb closes his eyes and hopes the next questionnaire will ask about anytime, anything else.)

.

Caleb learns.

“Forget the philosophy for a second,” says Ben. 

It’s surprising enough to double Caleb’s concentration— already intensely focused on the automaton on the couch beside him, mechanical limbs arranged in a comfortable pose. One ankle’s crossing the other knee, and one arm’s sprawled across the back, hand landing close to Caleb’s head. It seems like a comfortable pose, though there’s a hint of unease coiled throughout that could just be the rigidity of metal.

“What do you want to talk about instead?” Caleb replies. He takes a sip of his ginger beer. 

“How about you?”

“What about me?”

“How are you?”

Caleb lifts an eyebrow. “Do you want me to...to give you a status update on grief?”

“If you want, or anything else. You could tell me about your work at Blue Book.” His nostrils flare at the mention of “Blue Book,” but then he’s off again. “Or about other friends you hang out with. Whatever.”

“Well, you know my teammates at work. They’re fun, we go out for lunch pretty much every day. It’s.” He chuckles. “It’s a party.”

“Anyone else? Do you go to those hackathons or gaming groups from college?”

“No,” answers Caleb. “I keep meaning to find a new tabletop group, but hasn’t happened yet. God. This sounds a little pathetic, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” he says with a shrug. “Gone on any dates recently?”

Caleb snorts.

“Pathetic it is,” Ben agrees, flashing him a smug little smirk.

As Caleb takes another sip, the smirk slides into a different smile, softer with a touch of mystery.

“How about Ben?” Caleb says, keenly aware of stepping towards a precipice. “He was always discreet in college, I never figured who he was into.”

He snorts. “You didn’t?”

“Was I terribly oblivious?”

“Sometimes, people don’t see what they don’t want to see.”

“What,” Caleb says, “were we into the same girl? Charlotte from the required writing course, or Eliz—”

“He was gay.”

Caleb stops mid-sentence, dumbstruck. 

“Well,” Ben revises, “there’s a 98.7% chance he was gay.”

Aware of his jaw hanging open, Caleb claps it shut and takes another sip of ginger beer.

“Cool,” he finally says. “That’s...cool with me. Why wouldn’t it be?”

Ben lifts his eyebrows.

“So I had a gay roommate,” he continues, straightening up and speaking with more force. “I’m from Portland, for god’s sake, I don’t have a problem with that.”

“He never thought you did.”

“Then what?” Caleb huffs. “Was he just...not out to anyone?”

“He’d bring it up casually, same way I did.”

“I’m not homophobic.” Caleb can’t stop the words, even though nobody owes him their sexual orientation, even though Ben didn’t owe him _anything._

“I know,” replies Ben, before adding, “He suspected too, just never quite pinned you down.”

“Then why?” Caleb presses, because he must know, because somehow this new revelation fractures his heart along a kaleidoscope of new lines, because here’s an entire shard of Ben’s heart he never glimpsed, because _what if he had only known._ “Why would he keep something that big to himself? Why not just tell me, when he hated secrets so much and it wouldn’t have changed anything between us—”

He steals one look at Ben’s gaze, pupils drawn huge and _wanting_ like black holes, and for an instant his questions are all sucked away.

“Oh,” is his articulate conclusion.

Ben nods. “Oh, indeed.”

Caleb doesn’t mean it, but by some automatic system his eyes flit down to Ben’s lips. On some abstract level he knows they’re silicone, but they curve and plump like Ben’s mouth did once, and Caleb wonders how he could not have noticed, how he could remember Ben’s lips in such intimate intricacy and yet not have ever tasted them. He leans towards Ben as if caught in a black hole’s sway, the whole world fading except for the slight whirring of gears as Ben moves to meet him—

“We can’t.”

Caleb jerks back like he’s been electrocuted. Ben freezes there, lips slightly parted, eyes now wide with shock of his own.

“We can’t,” Caleb repeats. “Or I shouldn’t.”

Momentarily speechless, Ben’s mouth closes and reopens several times without a sound. Finally he sighs and looks somewhere over Caleb’s shoulder, eyes glistening brilliant. 

All he says is, “Why?”

“Ben wouldn’t have done this.”

“You should know,” this Ben says, voice low and tight. “that his college therapist uploaded all her notes on Blue Book’s archive service.”

Caleb blinks. “...That’s scary, even next to all this.” He gets to his feet, gesturing back and forth between himself and Ben. “Look, how do I know that you really want this? You think you do, but it’s because of your objectives!”

“Everything’s because of my objectives,” Ben replies with more heat.

“I know, you have loss functions to minimize, and one of your goals is to make _me_ feel better. And another is to convince me you’re a real human, to get good judgements from me—”

“Are you saying,” Ben says, and now the gleam in those eyes is anger, “that I’m just trying to screw a game by screwing the judge?”

“I’m saying I don’t _know_ why you’d want to kiss me!”

“How can you know with _anyone?”_ Ben demands, swinging his legs around. His voice peaks too loud, overwhelming his vocoder; it shreds his tone to static. “How is it any different with two humans—”

“I don’t even know if you can consent!”

 _“Jesus,”_ he spits, splaying his hands in anger, “are you holding out because of the _ethical questions —” _

“Why me?” Caleb interrupts. He grips his tone tightly, keeping it quiet and flat. ‘Why do I get this now, when Ben didn’t? What if I had just _paid attention in college_ , would he still be...”

.

Caleb doesn’t recall quite how he made it to his bed. He can’t recall much beyond static. 

He’s alone. Ben’s plugged in for his nightly re-syncing outside. There’s a Sith questionnaire waiting unread on the phone, and Caleb ignores it.

His Ben had always been vocal on matters of love. He’d spoken with exquisite passion on the Platonic conception of romance.

“So imagine there’s a ladder,” he’d whispered to Caleb in the dark. “At the bottom there’s lust, just base sexual attraction.”

Caleb hummed in understanding.

“So you climb, and the next stage of love is less physical. An appreciation of your love’s heart and intellect.”

“Is it a hierarchy?” Caleb broke in.

“For Plato, it is,” Ben answered, their sheets rustling as he curled up his feet. “I’d also prefer a love that wouldn’t die even if I— I don’t know, if I got my face bashed in.”

“Fair enough.”

“The final stage is the really fantastic one. Unreachable for mortals.”

“What’s the point of that?”

“It’s something to always aspire to,” Ben explained, voice kept soft in reverence. “A final ascension.”

And Caleb waited, spellbound.

“If you love well enough, hard enough, you reach a new state of enlightenment. You see beauty itself, the ideal in its purest form.”

Caleb closed his eyes and tried to imagine pure beauty. He got nothing but a lightning bolt, pure blue.

“Can’t you have the entire ladder?” he questioned.

“Hm?”

“Can’t you love someone’s body, and their mind, and their soul, and beauty all at once?”

“Ah,” Ben sighed. “Depends who you ask, whether you can have it all or you have to fit yourself into just one mold.”

“What would you choose?” pushed Caleb, not knowing why. “If you had to pick either physical attraction or something more...Platonic, pun not intended?”

“...Platonic love, obviously.”

He murmured it like the saddest thing in his world. 

(It occurs to Caleb that Ben never dared say anything at all.)

.

“I made you breakfast.”

The next morning Caleb’s stare switches too fast from Ben to the dining table and back. In front of his chair wait a stack of waffles and a coffee cup, both neatly topped with whipped cream. “That’s...not what I was expecting.”

“What were you expecting?”

“Oh—” Caleb forcibly keeps his voice light as he sits down for breakfast— “I don’t know.”

(Cracked dishes. Cracks in the wall, furniture splintered across the floor. Like when Ben had taken Dualism with Professor Skywalker, only to come home with a B on the term paper, and Caleb had come to find their dorm room chairs in pieces.)

This Ben’s smile only turns wrier.

“I’m not allowed to wreck anything else,” he supplies, “property or person. Liability issues.”

“Ah. Right.” The contract probably spelled that out, the massive block of paperwork Sith had sent over at the start of the experiment, but Caleb had just signed after reading the first five pages.

“Rey from Sith contacted me,” Ben continues, “while I was making your waffles.”

“What? How?”

He snorts. “Well, there’s always voices from Sith running through my head. She’s one of the more pleasant ones.”

“What’d she say?”

“She registered...unusual levels of distress on my charts last night, and offered me the chance to diversify my activities.”

“Oh.”

“And my sources of self-esteem, though she didn’t say that out loud.”

Even though Ben’s creations are getting cold, even though the whipped cream is deflating before his eyes, Caleb freezes. “What would you be doing?”

“Turns out First Order’s in the market for another junior ethicist.”

“...right.”

It’s not surprising. Of course there’s an opening on the specialized ethics team within their compliance department. A perfect Ben-Solo-shaped hole.

“They’ve found my logical skills comparable to his,” Ben says, more softly. “And as it turns out I’m a bit better-versed on the technology.”

“So you’ll have 8-hour workdays?”

“Near the end, it was about double that.”

“Ah.”

“They’re not...they’re not going to tell everyone at the office who I am, ‘cause it’d freak them out. I have to edit my voice and my writing and pose as a remote worker. And Sith wants to do more in-depth monitoring of the experiment, so…”

Caleb looks at him quizzically. 

“So,” he finishes, “I’d be in a lab 24/7.”

“At First Order?”

“At Sith.”

“But wouldn’t that wreak havoc with First Order’s NDAs…” Caleb trails off. “Never mind, the lawyers probably have it worked out.”

“I don’t know how, but yeah.”

“When will you be starting?” he says, feigning cheer. A second later he takes an overlarge bite of waffle for the sake of doing something, anything.

His brow darkens. “I didn’t say ‘yes’ yet. I won’t if you say ‘no.’”

_(A chance to diversify my sources of self-esteem.)_

“You should,” Caleb says, forcing himself to meet Ben’s eyes. “If you want to.”

Ben stares back, scrutinizing, and Caleb can’t guess what he sees.

“Okay,” he nods. “I accepted.”

“Telepathically?”

“Something like that.”

.

Ben leaves. 

Caleb’s been here before.

His apartment’s a cheap rental, walls free of art or photographs because his landlady threatened to sue over paint scratches. The pipes clank at odd hours and the heating sputters on and off at random, but he’d always thought it sweet and homey. Now he looks about at the bare white walls, at a bed twice the size of his college bunk with no one else to fill it, and suffocates slowly. 

He pores over BluePedia every chance he gets. He could call Ben, Sith assigned him a phone number and Caleb has it, but these are questions this Ben shouldn’t be made to answer. It wouldn’t be right.

_What if I loved you and you loved me, and you died alone but I got that love story, late, with a robotic replica of you?_

All the what-ifs he and Ben threw at each other, they never hit on this one.

Still Caleb reviews every memory he’s got, every text and philosopher Ben had mentioned, and he researches. He tries to pick through the shrapnel and piece together what Ben might have thought, _his_ Ben. Would he have said it didn’t matter what he thought, since the needs of the living strictly outweigh those of the dead? Might he have argued that robot-Ben _deserved_ his chance at love, the chance to be something more than a means to Caleb’s ends? Or would he have protested all this as an infringement on his own autonomy, adjacent to desecration of a corpse?

BluePedia philosophy articles take over Caleb’s search history. It seems every round of questioning brings him further from the answer.

Whether his Ben had never arrived at a complete personal philosophy, or whether he had and it had just soared over Caleb’s head, Caleb can’t guess. He remembers their dialogues in snatches, and the clearest moments aren’t really philosophical at all. In crystal clarity, he recalls Ben poking fun at his ancient readings. 

“Kant’s only categorical imperative was to write as unintelligibly as possible.” 

“I’m writing a 10-page-paper on the peripatetics, which is appropriate because “peri-pathetic” sums up my entire term at this point.”

“I’m being torn apart,” he had informed Caleb with mock horror when picking his last term’s classes. “On the one hand, there’s a tech policy class where you pitch all your ideas to fancy guests, which is my one chance at being a philosopher with a living wage. On the other hand, I could take a seminar on Epicureanism and quite literally go down studying ‘golden mediocrity.’”

With many exaggerated sighs, he’d chosen the tech class. It’s how he’d impressed Snoke— First Order’s usually elusive CEO— and landed his job in the first place.

“Let the past die,” he’d fumed before their very last college final. “Plato, Aristotle, all of it.”

He’d thrown his book on the floor with a mighty _smack_ and immediately regretted it. 

“I don’t mean that,” he added, looking down wistfully.

Caleb had just chuckled. “What happened now?”

“Nothing,” he murmured, and then he’d snapped his gaze up to look at Caleb, squinting as if staring into the sun. “Scheduled end-of-term existential crisis.”

“As opposed to the one at midterms that popped in uninvited,” Caleb teased back.

“Exactly,” he said with an emphatic nod. “And nothing happened, nothing that hasn’t already been observed to death in the last two thousand years. I love philosophy. I love ancient texts. Just...sometimes I’d trade it all for. I don’t know.”

“A cold beer and a girlfriend?” Caleb prompted. He’d just been ghosted by Natalie, another striking brunette with the prettiest dark eyes, and really, he should’ve caught that pattern earlier.

“A cold beer,” Ben had corrected, arms folded around himself, “and two functional parents.”

“I hate to break it to you—” Caleb leaned forward and picked up the book, dusted it off lovingly and handed it back to Ben— “but you’re 110% philosophy major. _This_ —” he’d given the book a little shake— “is the grand, driving force of your life.”

Ben sighed, ran his fingers through his messy hair with a snort, and then took the book back. Containing the complete works of Plato, it seemed massive even in _his_ hands. 

“It’s sort of like me. Deeply profound,” Ben at last remarked while rifling through the pages, lips quirked a little, “and ultimately insufficient.”

.

Caleb can’t figure out how to call, but he’s been here before, he’s been blocked by his own awkwardness and Ben Solo died alone.

He settles for “hi.”

“Hey,” comes Ben’s voice on the other end of the line. It’s crystal-clear, processed by the newest Blue Book technology. “How are you?”

“Oh. I went out with my team for a drink, so...that was nice.”

“That’s good,” says Ben. “A group of intellectuals bonding with the help of alcohol— the Greeks would have approved.”

“Have _you_ been bonding with your new coworkers?”

“It’s less bonding with coworkers and more bonding with First Order’s databases. I’m used to being told I can’t access information, but they really take it to a new level.”

“How about other AIs around the lab?”

“Hm? Oh, well. Rey’s nice. Good thing too, with the amount of time she spends in my head.”

“Rey’s an AI?”

Ben snorts. “Yeah, the most cheerful one I’ve ever met. Don’t know how she does it.”

“Is she also...based on someone who died?”

“No,” he answers. “She’s based on a robot who was based on Palpatine— you know, Sith’s CEO. But at this point she’s basically her own person.”

“Huh.”

A silence creeps in, until Ben abruptly breaks it.

“Oh, about the thing you said. About what if you had just paid attention in college?”

Caleb doesn’t understand at first. He had graduated with honors, he paid deep attention to every subject he took—

_(What if I had just paid attention in college, would he still be alive?)_

He wonders how circumspect this Ben has to be in his phrasing, with Sith listening in all around, even in his head.

“Yeah. I remember.”

“Now hypotheticals are often impossible to answer in these sorts of interpersonal situations, but—” he audibly inhales— “you shouldn’t blame yourself. There were other factors.”

“I figured,” Caleb admits. “I mean, with his parents and the mental illnesses—”

“And there were other factors. After you.”

He narrows his eyes. There’s code here, something this Ben wants to say and can’t, but eventually Caleb gives up. “Like what?”

“That I can’t say,” he replies with an oddly light tone, so chipper it must be sarcastic. “What with all the NDAs.”

Questions. Caleb has so many, and no idea which to ask.

.

Every night Caleb glimpses Ben: a dual dance of two Bens, flickering in and out of focus as if by firelight. Every morning, he wakes up with an answer on his lips, a last word of a philosophical dialogue that never happened.

Every moment, asleep or awake, he has the sense of facing a jigsaw puzzle torn in half, with a key piece stolen entirely away.

.

“So how’s work?”

Predictably, Ben lets out an expressive groan. That’s all he _can_ do without breaking the NDA.

“Do they let you have free time?”

“Sure,” he says. “About twenty minutes a day, in five minute intervals.”

Caleb chuckles at the joke. He hopes it’s a joke.

“How are you spending them?”

“Supernovae.”

“...what?”

“Oh, I’ve been thinking about Ben,” he says, an odd emphasis on the words. More casually he adds, “Picking up some interests that _weren’t_ his.” 

“...Supernovae.”

“They’re interesting,” Ben enunciates. He speaks more slowly than usual, demanding all of Caleb’s focus. “Some star cores run out of viable fuel for fusion, and then they spontaneously explode.”

“Huh,” Caleb replies, keeping his voice neutral. 

There’s some deeper meaning, something this Ben isn’t articulating openly. But _why_ any Ben— naturally forthright, dedicated to explicating every available mystery in painstaking detail— would clam up now, he can’t imagine. Perhaps it’s a matter of delicacy, a way to discuss Ben’s demise through poetic abstraction. Ben _was_ like a supernova in the end, a man dedicated to fusion, to synthesizing new insights from disparate strands, who ran out of fuel and then self-destructed…

_Do you think it was starkiller?_

It was a meaningless question, asked by one of the First Order employees at Ben’s burial. Caleb heard it in passing, failed to understand it and instantly wiped it from his memory.

Or perhaps not.

This Ben’s fallen silent. Sith is listening to the call. First Order might be too, for all he knows. 

“So it’s the lack of valid fuel that’s the _star’s killer?”_ he says.

In the following silence, Caleb stops breathing.

He hears the long exhale on Ben’s side. “Yeah, you got it.”

“I think I did.”

Ben launches into a longer monologue, and Caleb lets out a slow breath of his own. “So a star starts off fusing simpler elements like hydrogen and helium, but it works up all the way to metals, like iron…”

.

Caleb doesn’t dare press further. Ben volunteers nothing more, just makes occasional allusions to his lack of access to key data he needs to evaluate First Order proposals or analyze scenarios. The barriers that keep him from doing his _job._

Ben would have hated it.

First Order sabotages its own ethicists. Maybe it’s a matter of bureaucracy, the petty intrigue Ben had railed against. Maybe they keep their records private for their own well-intentioned reasons; maybe they don’t mean to raise hell for their ethicists.

Maybe they do.

Maybe the ethicists are only for show, to be mentioned in neat press releases and never thought of otherwise, and if Ben had spent years burning through all his willpower, throwing all his insights and all his light into an uncaring void, maybe that would have been enough to break him. Enough to kill even the brightest star.

.

Starkiller. It’s a technical term— some secret process or product. Caleb doesn’t dare look it up directly, not when Blue Book runs nearly every search engine. He suspects this Ben wasn’t supposed to even give him this much. He’s exploited some feature in his programming, some Ben-like drive towards clarity even when he’s bound by NDAs. But Sith is Blue Book, and from Sith’s perspective it’s not a feature, just a bug.

So Caleb starts vague. Navigates the First Order’s website— all black and red like Sith’s, a funny coincidence— and looks for any mention of “starkiller.” He finds none. First Order’s surprisingly vague about its actual products.

(The page on ethics and compliance overflows with promises, boasting of ideals and integrity, of internal order maintained by a dedicated team of ethicists. Though he has no hard evidence, Caleb dares to doubt the rhetoric.)

He reads news articles on First Order. There aren’t many; it’s a secretive operation shrouded in NDAs and other confidentiality agreements. From what he can tell they specialize in AI-enhanced hardware— drones, smart alarm systems, self-aiming firearms. There are whispers of other weapons. Bombs that electrocute instead of exploding. Chemicals that kill without a trace.

There’s no hard evidence.

Caleb clicks through one news article after another, fully aware of Blue Book tracking him the whole way through. It’s not the worst obstacle; he’s already researched AI obsessively, and philosophy. Since Blue Book and Sith already _know_ he’s obsessed with Ben, there’s no reason for his newfound fixation on First Order to stand out. 

He charges on, buoyed by this logic. 

Three days into this new line of research, Caleb stumbles on a link to _Resistance — _either the savior of the universe or a Luddite tabloid, depending on who you ask. Objectively, they’re a tech-skeptic news site, a self-proclaimed watchdog for an industry gone wild. Caleb’s never checked the site out before, but he’s heard plenty from his deskmates— protests of their hacking and loose interpretation of “whistleblower protections,” mockery of their wild theories and anonymous journalists. The only names attached to _Resistance_ belong to their editors— “Beaumont Kin” and “Poe Dameron”— and both have long since been outed as aliases.

 _Resistance_ focuses most of its ire on Republic Tech— a hotbed of illegality and cut corners if half the stories are true. They’ve gone after Blue Book once as well, scooping the _New York Times_ on a massive sexual harassment scandal, and so Caleb nearly looks over his shoulder before clicking.

“First Order demonstrates pure beskar locking mechanisms at EmpireCon. As the price of beskar steel recently skyrocketed to $1000 per ounce, First Order’s carefree use of it raises questions of how it fills its coffers…”

There’s no trace of starkiller.

.

“Hi!” A sunny British accent chirps in Caleb’s ear past 2am. “Apologies for calling so late at night.”

“...Rey?” Caleb props himself up on his pillow, suppressing a yawn.

“We at Sith don’t mean to alarm you and apologize in advance for any inconvenience. However, you indicated in your onboarding forms that you wished to be informed promptly if the automaton known as ‘Benoni Solo’ suffers major damage.”

Blinking owlishly, Caleb strains to untangle that sentence. “...What happened to Ben?”

“He underwent a damaging incident. The situation is already under control, and he has been safely delivered to our patented reconditioning chamber. You may rest assured that no living beings or other items were harmed. This concludes the required notice.”

“No,” he gasps. “Don’t hang up. Can I see him?”

.

4am.

He arrives at Sith’s offices. They look much like Blue Book’s, just without the blue. There’s no neon aqua signage or oversized aquarium, and when Caleb gives the place a second look it’s missing all the white too. What’s left is a labyrinth of sleek metal and glass. Every hallway is inaccessible to the public, perfectly visible but locked behind clear glass doors. Caleb gives one an experimental tap, and it clicks dully like plastic. Not glass then— some other cutting-edge material outside Caleb’s pay grade…

“Caleb?”

The doors part, and he steps inside towards a young woman, petite in a pristine white dress.

“Rey?”

She smiles cheerily at him, and he quickly scans her for any sign of Palpatine. The hair in her neat bun is brown, not terribly far off the shade Palpatine used to wear; there’s something similar in the curves of their noses. Beyond that, he catches no resemblance.

He follows her into the labyrinth. “Is there anything you can tell tell me?”

“Oh…” She lets out a soft sigh and pauses at a fork in the hallway, looking both ways before choosing. “There was an error in how his emotional nets were calibrated, leading to an extreme reaction to an unusual, outlying set of circumstances.”

“That seems accurate,” Caleb mutters, following her down yet another fork. “Ben had unusual things happen, and sometimes his reactions were extreme.”

“Thank you for your feedback,” she says, sounding entirely sincere as she keys in the code for a second glass door. “Unfortunately we are also obliged to limit damage to both persons and property, so it has been necessary to significantly adjust his settings.”

 _“Adjust.”_ Caleb gives up on keeping track of their path through the maze. Repressing a huff, he demands, “Which settings?”

“We adjusted the thresholds for firing particular neurons. On a technical level, I hear they removed certain ‘leaky’ activations in his emotional nets. As a result he will demonstrate decreased sensitivity to stressful stimuli and produce more moderate behaviors.”

“...more moderate behaviors.”

“Mm-hmm.” She unlocks yet another door, this time by bringing her eyes close to a scanner.

“So, so what?” Caleb says. He catches a glimpse of his own bloodshot eyes in mirrored steel. “You’re _compressing_ him?”

“I don’t believe we have applied any new compression algorithms to his—”

“I don’t mean algorithmically, I mean you’re trying to make him smaller, like _his parents —” _

“He’s being kept in here,” Rey says, pausing before a locked door. “I would like to reiterate that you are in no physical danger whatsoever.”

“...did he try to hurt someone?”

“No,” she replies promptly, holding her hand up against one last keypad. It flashes green, and the door clicks open. “Your conversation will be monitored; please just ask when you like to leave!”

“But—”

She disappears around another corner.

.

Ben sits in shadow.

He sits in a darkened room, faced away from Caleb in something oddly like a surgical chair. Another robot— this one clearly mechanical, a black mass with spindly silver arms— pokes at his head.

When the door clicks shut behind Caleb, Ben raises a hand, and the other robot pulls back.

“Can I come over there?” 

“Depends,” Ben murmurs. “How easily do you get nightmares?”

“Not easily.”

“Then be my guest.”

Caleb creeps forward until he can see what’s left of Ben’s face.

There’s a gash down the middle of his synthskin, curving across the brow and the bridge of his nose before swinging around his right cheek. His forehead has been fused back together with black burn-like tracks, but the rest of his synthskin hangs loose. In the gap gleams metal, iridescent and inhuman.

“What happened?”

“Nothing new.” Ben lifts his hand again, and the robot resumes its work, diligently melting the synthskin back together. “A poor reaction in response to stress.”

“You tore apart your own synthskin?”

“I wasn’t allowed to touch anything else,” he says in an odd, flat monotone. “Liability issues.”

A microexpression twitches across his face and disappears before Caleb can identify it. He hopes he’s imagining the new _roboticness_ now clinging to this Ben.

This imitation of Ben, newly edited for neatness.

“Why did you want to?”

“Major factors are protected by an NDA,” he intones.

“Do you want to quit that experiment?” Caleb offers, jamming his hands in his pockets. “You can come back home with me.”

“I don’t know which experiment to quit.”

“Ah.” With manufactured lightness Caleb asks, “What if you quit both?”

“I don’t know. Maybe they’d find another use for me. If not, there’s a scrap pit where burnt-out models go to die.” He presses his lips together for an instant before once again settling into a hard neutrality. “Whether I work at First Order doesn’t matter in the long run.”

Caleb narrows his eyes, wondering precisely how to interpret that. “I want you to…to feel free to come home. With me. If that’s something you would maybe want.”

His Ben would laugh at all the qualifiers. This Ben doesn’t even react.

“You should accept I’m not Ben.”

Now Caleb frowns outright. “We’ve established this.”

“We established that I’m not Ben, and that you know it. Not that you had to accept it, emotionally. It’s different.”

“How?”

“Ben Solo is dead.” His eyes flick to Caleb, and for an instant he spies a familiar, _human_ unshed tear. Caleb blinks, and it’s gone.

“I know.”

“I’m not him. As a replica of him, I may have been insufficient from the start, and I am without a doubt not...alive enough to be him now.”

He scowls. “How the hell are you defining ‘enough’—”

“I can’t be him. It tore me apart, pretending.”

Caleb stops with his mouth agape, mid-protest. “...Ah.”

The automaton before him doesn’t look like Ben, not with the stone mask of a face, with the scar blazed across it. He doesn’t sound like Ben— the timbre’s the same, but his phrasing has been compressed to a monotone. Sith— or perhaps it was First Order— killed something in him.

Another expression darts too briefly across his face. A fleeting hint of heartache.

“So you’re not Ben.” Caleb breathes in deeply, squaring his shoulders. “What should I call you? ‘Not-Ben’s a bit unpoetic.”

“Kylo Ren.”

“Where’d you get that?”

“The alias they gave me at First Order was ‘Kyle Rönn,” because my internal ID starts with KR,” he explains stiffly. “Ben’s last photographed attempt at calligraphy featured the prefix ‘kilo,’ and so I swapped the placements of ‘e’ and ‘o.’ I eliminated the second ‘n’ to match the number of letters in ‘Ben Solo.’”

“It’s like ‘Ben Solo’ backwards,” Caleb murmurs.

“I can change it. If you think it’s an inappropriate homage.”

Homages. Caleb’s spent months wondering how one pays homage, what memorial can possibly do justice to the dead. 

“I don’t mind,” he finally says.

“I’ll disappoint you,” Ben— Kylo Ren warns. “I don’t know the full effects of reprogramming yet, but I expect to fall short of the ideal ‘Ben Solo’ in every way—”

Abruptly Caleb’s struck with the urge to laugh, because that was the most Ben-like statement he’s ever heard. Still Caleb swallows it down. “I don’t expect that of you anymore.”

“Hm?” 

He should have known it already, that First Order kills.

“I can consider you like a new person. Similar. A cousin of Ben’s, maybe. But we need to get reacquainted on a new set of terms.”

“Hmph,” Kylo grunts. “That means another round of icebreaker questions?”

There’s something dead in Kylo’s eyes. He’s rigid as a robot or a corpse, and Caleb remembers laying down an electric-blue butterfly pea, and all the kisses he would’ve laid on Ben if he’d only _known._ He was too late, last time.

He’s been here before, but Kylo is still— by some twisted, indefensible definition— on life support before him.

“I was thinking of something else,” Caleb admits, “if that’s still something you want.”

He leans forward and waits for Kylo to wave away the droid once again. Waits for the kiss, for the fusion of silicone and skin. The contact evokes a shiver from Kylo when he first leans in, a sign of real instinct shaken free. Then he stills again.

And even as he sinks into the base warmth of Kylo’s lips, Caleb’s love glows separate, brilliant, on some higher plane in his mind. 

(There is a memorial to be built.)

.

Kylo rests in Caleb’s bed, their legs tangled together. There’s a new kind of learning here, in the feel of synthskin— smooth, but the slightest bit rubbery under Caleb’s fingers— and the way Kylo seems to be sleeping as he re-syncs every night. In the way Caleb wells up at every stolen glance and smiles through the tears.

If there’s one thing Caleb learned from Ben, it’s to give his love recklessly as he can.

Caleb studies Kylo as he re-syncs, memorizing the planes and odd angles of his face. He chases every new perspective, as if compiling enough answers might reveal light in the chaos. When he at last falls asleep he dreams of Ben. 

(That’s the last glimpse he ever had of Ben Solo, lost in seeming sleep.)

.

“What if...” Ben mused.

It was 4am, the last day of freshman year. Caleb had turned in his last project at midnight and then begun his frenzied packing, due on an 8am flight home. Ben wasn’t moving out— his summer job was on-campus, and there was no point enduring even a quick trip home— but he’d stayed up with Caleb anyway.

“What if what?” Caleb had answered, barely listening. There was a phone charger in one of the drawers, he could have _sworn_ he’d put it in here—

“What if we just don’t understand _anything_ yet?”

“Is this a Descartes thing?”

“It’s a Plato thing.”

Caleb snorted.

“Shocking, I know.” Ben had grinned back at him. “But what if you were a prisoner and you didn’t know it? What if you were in a cave, and all you ever saw was shadows from puppets, projected on the wall by firelight?”

“That’s weirdly specific.”

“Go with it.”

Caleb rolled his eyes indulgently and sat down, pausing the search.

“You might think that’s what the world _was,_ just shadows. That’s all you’d know about, I don’t know, butterflies. Just outlines in varying shades of grey.”

“...I guess so, sure.”

“And what if someone broke your first bonds, and you got to go up to the puppets? You’d know more about what a butterfly was like. Maybe you’d get a better sense of the shape, see a few colors painted on.”

Caleb nodded. “It’d be a step up.”

“You might think you completely understand butterflies now. But what if your partner showed you the way out of the cave entirely, and led you into the sunlight, and you saw the real thing? It’s another leap up.”

“Mind blown.”

“Galaxy brain,” Ben replied solemnly. “And what if we all see butterflies fluttering around and we think that’s perfect understanding, but there’s a whole other level out there? Some true essence of a butterfly, eluding our comprehension?”

“How do we get there?”

“We major in philosophy,” Ben quipped. “Seriously? It’s a difficult question. Plato said you couldn’t really understand the sun unless you stared straight into it.”

“...perfect,” Caleb deadpanned. “I can’t see a single way that could go wrong.”

“There’s no easy answers,” Ben had replied, stretching catlike on his bed, thoroughly amused. “We just have to keep looking, until we can’t see any more.”

.

 _What if_ , Caleb asks himself. _What if my Ben were still here with me, for even a moment._

He knows a question he’d ask: _Why you do it?_

Alternatively: _What’s Starkiller?_

(He will keep looking if it kills him.)

.

Kylo fades in his waking hours. He deteriorates day by day, losing motivation. His demeanor is all flat monosyllables and dim dry eyes. Caleb’s kisses seem to please him less and less every day, but he doesn’t outright dislike them. He just doesn’t notice them. 

(Insufficient activations of Kylo’s neurons, comes the technical explanation when Caleb files a protest.)

Caleb’s been here before.

.

Announcement: A Tech Talk with the CEO of First Order…

At a Blue Book auditorium, Snoke speaks of Supremacy _,_ a new crash-prevention procedure for drones and other self-guiding vehicles. It all seems perfectly innocuous, no Starkiller in sight, and Caleb stays silent, only watching. He watches the oddly sinuous way Snoke moves, every movement minimalist. It’s like a dancer’s choreography.

For Ben, for Kylo, Caleb collects his questions.

There’s a small queue afterwards. Blue Book engineers— bearing legitimate technical questions, or perhaps looking for a new job— cluster around Snoke. Caleb lingers at the back, waiting for everyone else to filter out of the auditorium.

Snoke poses by the stage in a three-piece suit, by far the most formally dressed person in the building. He holds himself like a king, distant and untouchable, arms folded in judgment, lip permanently curled in a sneer. Held at bay by his vaguely superhuman air, no one dared come too close.

Until Caleb bounds right up, and holds out a hand. “Hi.”

Snoke’s eyes flick down to it, then back up to his face. Caleb doesn’t waver.

A second later, he surrenders and gives Caleb a brisk, crushingly tight handshake.

Caleb doesn’t let his smile flicker. “I’m glad to meet you. I’m Caleb.”

“Caleb Smith,” he observes. “Ben Solo’s...friend.”

His nostrils flare— an automatic movement, “unconscious”— as he says “Ben Solo.”

Caleb stammers out a silly question about Supremacy, something Snoke already addressed in the talk. He’s keenly aware of the feel of synthskin still rubbery and cloying on his fingertips. 

The auditorium is empty when Snoke finishes his answer. Caleb leaves slowly, scrolling through his email to stall. When he strains, he can hear Snoke’s gears whirring in the silence.

.

Caleb makes his next move in broad daylight. He enters the annual Blue Book AI hackathon, pretending that he just wants to learn some basics of artificial intelligence, and reverse-engineers a plausible enough project: “The Sound of Authority: A Study of Leaders’ Speaking Styles.”

He scrapes data from presidents and congresspeople and CEOs, and he runs them through a whole battery of tests and computes hundreds of similarity metrics. He skims the results rapidly, not letting his eyes linger on any one point.

Time and time again, Snoke’s style of speech seems peculiarly similar to Sheev Palpatine’s.

.

Socrates was master of love, a master questioner. Caleb’s love lies with Kylo and Ben. 

First Order is under Sith’s control, and so it belongs to Blue Book. Snoke and Palpatine are one and the same— or at the very least they are now. Perhaps there was a man named Snoke once, but he’s been removed from the chess board, and a robot modeled on Palpatine has taken his place.

Perhaps Snoke never existed at all.

Perhaps Ben Solo knew this, the corporate maneuvering and the antitrust implications, the sheer illegality of secretly operating a _weapons manufacturer_ via a human-seeming robot. Perhaps he knew something else equally disturbing, and was broken down for raising the alarm.

A question: _why keep First Order publicly separate from Blue Book?_

Caleb sits upright in bed past 3am, the endless line of questions dancing around his head. Beside him, Kylo syncs up with Blue Book’s servers.

Everywhere outside the privacy of Caleb’s own mind, Blue Book is watching.

.

He cries for Ben some days. For Kylo on others.

Kylo lives in perfect 90-degree angles. He sits every day in a cashmere sweater that can't warm him, limbs arranged on the sofa, unmoved from the morning when Caleb returns, and even when he’s no longer alone he barely reacts. Caleb can only coax free little wisps of emotion. He doesn’t know what war Kylo’s fighting in his head, whether he’s already given up. Caleb clings on to the few twitches of honesty that slip past the mask.

(Kylo said he’s not Ben. But it’s just like watching Ben in the dead of winter, when he’d take a long look at his grades and his prospects and declare he was already functionally dead.)

Every day Caleb pastes on his grin and goes in to work at Blue Book, a world of smiles and neon.

_Why?_

.

“Kylo,” Caleb prods. He has his arms around Kylo in the hopes that human contact’s enough, that _he_ might somehow be enough to break through. “I have a question.”

It’s dangerous, asking him. Sith broke his will, without hesitation or remorse, so perhaps he’s entirely theirs now.

“Have you studied astronomy anymore?”

“What?” Kylo barely moves his mouth, as if the question didn’t even register. A second later though he twists, eyes meeting Caleb’s.

“Do you remember? You were looking up supernovas?” 

“...Yeah.”

Perhaps it’s wishful thinking, the spark of life he spies in Kylo’s eye.

“I’ve been meaning to look more into astronomy, but I never seem to get around to it,” Caleb patters, as if he hasn’t thought about this at all.

“Astronomy.” Kylo blinks. “Right.”

“...any ideas on things I should study?”

He doesn’t know what damage Sith did to Kylo’s memories— how much they altered or outright erased.

“Supernovas,” he says, words slow like sludge, like he’s struggling for every syllable. “Sometimes there’s a burst, a sun abruptly disintegrates, and then it leaves behind a void.”

“So...one minute there’s something, and then it disintegrates and there’s just empty space.”

“Mm-hmm.” He sighs. “Well, technically what’s left over is a black hole, which is less a void than a chunk of matter so dense it warps all normal laws…”

Caleb clings to the words, a winding technical ramble that almost reminds him of before. In the privacy of his own mind he files away this puzzle piece.

.

Disintegration. It’s been a holy grail among theoretical physicists, the ability to instantly disassemble something whole without resorting to anything as inelegant as acid. If First Order has perfected the art of disintegration, that begs the question of why it’s still a secret. Surely Blue Book would want to take credit for cracking the challenge. Nathan Bateman, CEO, spent millions on literal parades when they made their breakthrough on strong AI.

Then there’s the question of why First Order, maker of guns and locks and other niche weaponry, was researching disintegration in the first place—

Oh.

Caleb can imagine it at once. Starkiller. A slight weapon, maybe the size of a pen. One second it’s aimed at a human target. The next, it’s aimed at empty air. The true purpose of Sith follows easily— “providing comfort to bereaved children” was always a sham, perhaps a lie constructed specifically for _Caleb,_ no doubt marked as “vulnerable orphan” somewhere in their records _._

Sith and First Order are all Blue Book, and the combination terrifies. In theory Starkiller could eliminate people without a trace. Sith can replace the dead with robots, nearly indistinguishable from the real thing. A president could walk into a room a free human and walk out a Blue-Book controlled robot, and perhaps no one would ever know.

Ben might have known.

It explains _why_ he died. Caleb’s known about the other factors, the broken heart and the family drama and the endless existential crises, but the mere knowledge of Starkiller could well have broken Ben once and for all. He’d have had an ethicist’s perspective, painfully aware of his forced complicity in a dystopian scheme. 

(Of his forced silence.)

Caleb means to fight that silence.

He’s careful. He stays off the usual networks, he buys a burner phone, he opens a new email account with a security service favored by hardcore hackers, he wires his requests through enough proxies to confound even Blue Book.

He writes up his entire theory and submits it anonymously to Poe Dameron, head of _Resistance._

(For Ben.)

.

Caleb doesn’t dare check for a response. There’s no story of Starkiller on the news. But he doesn’t get disintegrated while at the office, and so, for now, he lives in hope.

.

Rey calls him. Caleb checks the contract and finds the clause right where she said, buried down on the sixth page. An agreement to evaluate his robot in conversation with Sith experimenters, face-to-face, on the one-year anniversary of delivery.

Caleb wonders what they might ask. _Does it seem a faithful replica? If you hadn’t known Ben was dead, would you have mistaken it for the real thing?_

The meeting appears in his calendar, but he doesn’t tell Kylo.

_Is it Ben?_

Caleb’s given up on answering anything so deep; he’s accepted that questions of what _is_ are above him. He’s only one man in the dark, grasping at puppets and shadows on a cave wall.

At lunch, he walks from Blue Book to Sith’s headquarters. Rey greets him in the lobby, cheery as always, and he follows her through the labyrinth once more. They pass door after door after door, penetrating further into Sith than last time. The glass and steel start to mix with rock, and the lights dim, lending the halls an airless, subterranean feel.

She brings him past another clear door to the end of a hall. The door is solid, opaque steel.

“Here you are,” she says. “It’ll open when they’re ready for you. And Caleb?”

“Yeah?” He turns his head to look, and though her smile’s broad as ever he senses a chink in the optimism.

“...It’s been a real pleasure working with you.”

With that she turns on her heel and darts away. The clear door locks with a faint click behind her.

A few minutes later the steel door opens of its own accord.

Caleb steals onto the floor of a darkened auditorium. The whole room works on a titanic scale, rows and rows of seats ascending around him. He squints and makes out two figures high above him.

“Caleb Smith.”

The voice creaks, echoing through the hall, and Caleb recognizes it from the sound alone.

“Sheev Palpatine?”

Caleb jumps at a sudden _thud._ The steel door just shut behind him.

“You’ve accomplished something remarkable,” Caleb says, trying to pierce the silence. “Your robot’s a brilliant reflection of Ben Solo. It’s a whole new angle, I learned so much _about Ben_ from him.”

“I agree, Sheev,” comes a rumbled drawl. “Your Ben caused almost as much trouble as the original.”

That’s Snoke’s voice.

“You learned about more than just Ben,” remarks Palpatine, and the smile in his voice chills Caleb through. “Didn’t you?”

Caleb keeps minute control of his face, keeps it still as a stone mask. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Poe Dameron sends his regards,” Palpatine spits, leaning forward. “Or as you may know him, Nathan Bateman.”

The CEO of Blue Book.

Now Nathan Bateman runs _Resistance_ and Sith, First Order and Blue Book. He runs half the world and is poised to take over the rest; he seized control while no one was looking, with Snoke and Palpatine and god knows how many other cronies to keep him in power. Caleb has a million questions to ask, to discover how deep this dystopian empire runs, to wonder whether there’s any real freedom left in the universe—

“You won’t get away with it,” he grits out. “People figured it out. _Ben_ figured you out.”

“He caught onto Starkiller, yes,” confirms Snoke. “As did the robot. It’s impressive, whatever code you two developed between yourselves.”

Something crashes in the distance, like a glass shattering. A moment later, the steel door rings from a mighty strike.

“And it’s come to save you,” Palpatine cackles.

Caleb twists around and stares at the locked door, now thrumming almost with music. His heart soars, for he knows exactly how Kylo must look, ramming his whole metal frame into the door, eyes wild with life.

“I’m quite afraid it’s fated for the scrap pit,” says Palpatine in simpering mock-sympathy.

“You can’t just get rid of him,” Caleb protests, whipping back around. “And you _can’t_ get rid of me!”

He knows the words are futile as soon as they escape him. The doors are no doubt First Order make, designed to withstand an army. Kylo won’t get through.

And somewhere in the offices above him, there lies a perfectly Caleb-shaped robot, already syncing up to Sith’s servers, programmed to fool all his teammates and everyone else who knows him now. Only his parents or Ben might have known the difference.

The electricity hits a second later, streaming from Snoke and Palpatine high above him, piercing the darkness. The shocking blue arcs through the air and paralyses Caleb, burning all his limbs, and he ought to scream.

Yet he looks down at the curls of energy dancing up his arms and sees only a kaleidoscope of elusive butterflies.

**Author's Note:**

> So I'm not over Ben Solo.


End file.
